Trauma, like epidemics, creates a constellation of ideological “mutations.” Then the cultural equivalent of natural selection kicks in, eliminating mutations that are less fit for the population. But how might this dynamic work in practice?
By Laura Spinney
First, the pharaoh changed his name from Amenhotep IV to Akhenaten. Then he decreed that a new capital of the kingdom should be built far from the old one. In this city, only one God was to be worshipped, abandoning all others: the sun god Aten.
Akhenaten's heresy was short-lived, ending with his death less than 20 years later. It was a parenthesis in the 3 years of cultural stability that characterized ancient Egypt. But its lasting imprint on art and thought makes it one of the most discussed religious revolutions of all time.
A common explanation is that Akhenaten had grown impatient with the all-powerful priests of the ancient capital of Thebes, who worshipped many deities. But what if he was actually avoiding an epidemic? The idea is not new, but it has come back into focus after the emergence of Covid-19.
Having experienced the worst pandemic of the last century, many Egyptologists and archaeologists are looking at the past with a different eye. They have seen firsthand the social impact a pandemic can have, the deepening inequalities, the rejection of state authority, xenophobia, and the search for meaning, and they have come to realize that these phenomena are likely to have precedents.
“Infectious diseases play a cultural and economic role that is repeated over time, right up to the present day,” says Louise Hitchcock of the University of Melbourne, Australia. Given how intertwined social conflict, viral ideas, and viruses are, Hitchcock and others wonder whether this could also explain the major cultural shifts that occurred in history during the time of Akhenaten, during the Black Death, and the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918.
The case of the plague – understood as an infectious disease of epidemic proportions – in Late Bronze Age Egypt offers some clues. In 2012, American Egyptologist Ariel Kozloff suggested that there were signs of an epidemic as early as the reign of Akhenaten's father, Amenhotep III.
She points to the 8-year gap in the written record, and to the fact that Amenhotep had ordered the construction of more statues of a goddess of healing, Sekhmet, who bore the head of a lion, than of any other deity. At one point he even changed his imperial residence, perhaps in an attempt to isolate himself.
In 2020, Jorrit Kelder of Leiden University in the Netherlands suggested that the same epidemic may have prompted Akhenaten to take more drastic action. Kelder noted how often people felt disappointed by governments that they expected to protect them from Covid-19.
The religious reform undertaken by Akhenaten in the 14th century BC “may perhaps be seen as a preemptive move to highlight the failure, not of himself but of the traditional gods, to protect Egypt,” he wrote. However, Akhenaten’s new city, Amarna, quickly became a crucial center in an international network of trade and diplomacy.
"A kind of first cosmopolitan era," says Kelder. Therefore, he too may not have escaped the epidemic as its founder had hoped. And the same contagious disease may have caused the death of him, his wife Nefertiti, and their 3 daughters.
The mysterious disease may have spread beyond Egypt, especially as people began to abandon Amarna. Hitchcock raises the question of whether this weakened a series of Mediterranean civilizations, leading to their destruction by the Sea Peoples (a group that quickly spread across the Eastern Mediterranean) and the end of the Bronze Age a little over a century later.
Joel Finkelstein, co-founder of the Networks Research Institute (NCRI) in New Jersey, USA, takes the same approach. NCRI analyzes information trends on social networks, and connects them to real-world events. Since the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic, regardless of political orientation, NCRI has noticed the rise of “revolutionary religious groups that are trying to disrupt relations with society, to create something that brings about a utopian era,” says Finkelstein.
Having built a following in the virtual sphere, the activity of these groups has now spread to the physical sphere. Other researchers have noted that people turn to religion in times of epidemics, even in an increasingly secular era like today. In April 2020, the Pew Research Center in the United States reported that a quarter of adults said their faith had been strengthened after the Covid-1 outbreak.
What people are looking for in religion these days is less clear. But it is likely that for many people it is a more controlled social order. Michel Gelfand of Stanford University in California has long argued that a society’s norms tighten in response to environmental threats such as disease, hunger and natural hazards, which require collective behavior and large-scale cooperation.
One way to encourage these actions is to pray to a “vengeful God” to punish lawbreakers. But religion is not the only way to make a culture more rigid. In a study of nearly 250.000 people in 47 countries, Leor Zmigrod of the University of Cambridge and his colleagues found that conservative and authoritarian attitudes increased with the increase in infectious diseases, and regardless of income, education and other factors.
And this link only applies to diseases transmitted from one person to another, not to non-communicable diseases. This suggests that the authoritarian turn is deeply social in nature and has to do with how we perceive other people. Although the study predates the emergence of Covid-19, people's behavior during the current pandemic has reinforced these findings.
“This deeply social disease, which can be transmitted from person to person, has led to a wave of authoritarianism around the world,” says Zmigrod. In a disturbing historical parallel, Christian Blickel of the Federal Reserve in New York found that in German cities in the early 1930s, the higher the death rate during the 1918 flu pandemic, the higher the number of votes for the Nazi party, and this again regardless of factors such as income and unemployment.
“In a pandemic, there is a great fear of chaos, and the desire for stronger measures from the authorities paves the way for support for more authoritarian governments,” says Gelfand. Michael Muthukrishna of the London School of Economics, a scholar of cultural evolution, has a Darwinian view on the matter.
Trauma, like epidemics, creates a constellation of ideological “mutations.” Then the cultural equivalent of natural selection kicks in, eliminating mutations that are less fit for the population. But how might this dynamic work in practice?
Both germs and ideas travel through human social networks, says Yale University sociologist and physician Nicholas Christakis. These networks have evolved to strike an optimal balance between the advantages and disadvantages of exposure to other people. “The spread of germs is the price you pay for the spread of ideas,” says Christakis. / Taken from "New Scientist" with abbreviations – Bota.al
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